The Ukrainian military is proving it can blow up pretty much whatever it wants inside Russia. Fewer and fewer places feel safe inside the country, as oil facilities, weapons factories, military convoys and bomber bases burn with increasing regularity.
The FP-5 Flamingo, a Ukrainian-made subsonic cruise missile with a range of 3,000 kilometers, has been the workhorse of this campaign. It is not a stealth weapon. It is not hypersonic. It is cheap, long-range, and effective enough to keep getting through. Over the past six months, Ukrainian forces have used it to hit ammunition depots near Volgograd, missile production plants in Tambov, oil refineries in Samara and Moscow, and a major military test site at Kapustin Yar. The Flamingo entered service in 2025 and has been steadily refined based on battlefield feedback.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed the strikes openly, removing any ambiguity about who is responsible. After a recent wave of overnight attacks that hit the Kuibyshev oil refinery in Samara and the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary, a facility that produces components for Russian Shahed drones and guided missiles, Zelensky said Flamingo missiles were used. Moscow, meanwhile, claimed its air defenses had intercepted 326 drones across 20 regions, describing one of the largest coordinated aerial assaults of the war.
The pattern is clear. Ukraine has built a strike capability that can reach deep into Russian territory without relying on Western-supplied long-range weapons, which have come with restrictions on their use. Ukraine’s own defense industry, which was written off as all but destroyed in 2022, has quietly become a manufacturer of weapons that are changing the shape of the war.
The strategic effect goes beyond the physical damage. Every refinery fire, every ammunition depot explosion, every factory shutdown forces the Russian military to relocate assets, disperse supplies, and redeploy air defenses away from the front lines. A Russian missile plant in Cheboksary, 900 kilometers from Ukraine, now has to worry about a Ukrainian missile hitting it. That is a psychological shift as much as a military one. The Kremlin has been forced to acknowledge the strikes publicly, a rarity for a government that prefers to project invulnerability.
Russia still holds the advantage in artillery, manpower, and air power. It still occupies roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory. But the assumption that Russia’s rear areas are safe, a foundational belief that has shaped Russian military planning since the Soviet era, has been broken. If Ukrainian drones can reach Cheboksary, Samara, Tambov and Moscow, there is no obvious limit on how deep they can go.
The independent think tank Chatham House has noted that Ukraine’s deep-strike strategy aims partly to demonstrate to the United States that Ukraine can defeat Russia on its own terms, without requiring direct American intervention. Whether that argument persuades Washington remains an open question. What is not in question is that Ukraine has achieved something that seemed impossible two years ago: it has made the war real for ordinary Russians in a way it never was before.
The Flamingo program also carries economic implications. Western analysts estimate that the FP-5 costs a fraction of the Russian air defense systems needed to intercept it. The asymmetry is deliberate: Ukraine forces Russia to spend millions protecting assets that cost tens of thousands to strike. Every Shahed component factory hit in Cheboksary or every refinery fire in Moscow adds up to a cumulative economic drain that Russia cannot easily replace under sanctions. This is a war of attrition fought with drones as much as with artillery shells.